I was reading some of the threads in GQ on archival storage media & Cecil’s take on long term data storage, and wondered what the chances would be of successfully retrieving data off a 8’ floppy disc.
Even if you could get an 8" drive off eBay the interface is likely to be some utterly weird thing that needs some proprietary interface and ancient OS to work.
So what do you do? The fate of the free world depends on getting that data!
What sort of 8" disc? There’s single density, double density, single sided, double sided, soft sectored, hard sectored, and many proprietary variations. The closest thing to a interchange standard was the IBM 3740 8" SS-SD disc. Some companies, like word processor vendors, intentionally used discs that were incompatible with everyone else’s hardware.
Well, I know that the data processing company I used to work for still had a few of those types of drives banging around out on the raised floor. I don’t know what they did with them, but I might see if I could find a similar company that would be willing to do a one time data retrieval.
The boring (but best first guess) solution is to call one of those data recovery outfits. I mean one of the real ones with clean rooms and all kinds of forensic gear. I bet they could do it for a hefty fee.
Barring that, I would try to find a working example of the original setup to see if it could read it. If it could, some may choose to jump hardware bringing the data more and more modern until it could be read in the present but that would likely have many issues. I would try to go for a modem connection straight from the very old to a modern system. There is lots of backwards compatibility built into modems.
You could buy an old machine with an 8" floppy and 5 1/4" floppy and swap the files. Then buy another machine with a 5 1/4" and a 3 1/2" drive and swap them over. Then buy a machine with a 3 1/2" drive and a CD burner and bring your information into the modern age
Actually it’s pure genius. Other than hit and miss with eBay where else are you going to find a guaranteed working 8" drive for recovering old data.
A local man named Sam Goldman did the same thing after WWII with obsolete airplane parts that were being mothballed and the planes sold to mostly 3rd world countries. Where did you go when you need a part to keep your airline going? He was the only game worldwide and became a millionaire many times over marketing these obsolete parts. That big junkyard (now moved) that many people saw coming into Salisbury, Md regional Airport was the money pump of a large fortune.
Any moderately sized town should have an outfit who can take date from one medium and transfer it. It won’t be cheap though. It will be easier to find them if you search for a place that transfers VHS to DVD which is probably the most common request.
The last time I bought 8" floppy disc drives, while they were still in mass production, they were $500 a unit. Not cheap, but they were far more reliable than the junk sold today. That was back when floppy disc drives were the only mass storage devices on most small computers, so they had to work reliably.
If we’re talking about an old IBM Displaywriter then it’s a stand-alone piece of equipment. Find a used one, upload the information and send it via modem to another computer. You can always resell the unit after you’re done. You might have to buy a stand alone modem too.
FWIW the RS232C serial connection that comes out on COM1 and COM2 on a PC are backward compatible to pre-PC hardware, and so is ASCII text. You might need someone to write a program, but probably you could just catch text with HyperTerminal (bundled with Windows) or with RealTerm (an excellent and more versatile free program you can find on the web). So if you come across an old computer with the right disk drive and a COM port, you’re home free.
You might try contacting some collegiate computer department. They might have some old equipment still in use or at least in storage for running a 8" disc and loading it onto a new format.
As mks57 said, “back in the old days” there were many different formats for 8" disks. Way back when, my employer at the time had a gizmo with two 8" drives and two 5 1/4" drives and proprietary software that would convert various different disks from various different word processors (this is in the days of stand-alone word processors like Micom’s - I’m not talking about programs like Wordstar running under DOS, although we could deal with those too). So, depending on what wrote the 8" disk you might still have a lot of work ahead of you even after figuring out how to read the bits off it